In a world of increasingly complex and distributed computer systems, an effective Event Management Service (EMS) is a key part of the necessary system management and administration infrastructure. The EMS provides timely warnings of impending problems, notifies of failing processes, identifies problem areas in a system, and may even automatically fix these problems before system performance interruption occurs. To achieve this, interoperability between different computer systems in a cellular computer architecture is necessary.
The ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) specification is an open industry specification co-developed by Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba. The ACPI specification establishes industry-standard interfaces for operating system-directed configuration and power management on laptop, desktop, and server computer systems. The ACPI specification evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) and application programming interfaces (APIs, PNPBIOS APIs, and Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) into a single well-defined power-management and configuration interface specification. The ACPI specification enables new power-management technology to evolve independently in operating systems and hardware while ensuring that the operating systems and hardware continue to work together.
The ACPI specification, however, is not explicitly designed to accommodate computer systems with multiple operating systems or multiple power-management specifications, i.e. systems with a cellular computer architecture. The ACPI specification works in tandem with an ACPI-compliant operating system within a single parent computer system, but is not configurable to work with several cellular computer systems within a single parent system. Thus, the ACPI specification does not provide for scalability in a cellular computer architecture. A particular problem arises when several cellular computer systems within a parent computer system are combined into a larger cellular computer system under a single operating system. System events from the smaller cellular systems were not able to be combined into the larger system, thus, system events would be generated for non-existent systems, i.e. the smaller cellular systems that become part of the larger cellular system. Furthermore, most industry implementations of the ACPI specification are assigned to fixed address spaces in I/O memory space and cannot be relocated. Since I/O space is typically limited to 64 KB, the scalability of the ACPI specification is further limited.